Project VILMA

Sometimes, I get home and just wish I could say to my virtual machine in the cloud, “magico presto, turn on!” and it’s on and ready for me to remote into and do things. I wanted to do things to make that happen, but time and procrastination happens to many. Thankfully, there was an upcoming developer gathering that I used as the catalyst to actually build a system that would work, almost like magic.

So, last Sunday, the Port of Spain chapter of GDG (Google Developer Groups) held a developer event, #GDGPOS #DevFest. They reached out to the local developer community for interesting projects and I responded with a proposal to build something that would work in the way I described.

GDGPOS Presenters

My proposal got accepted and I spent a few weeks building out the idea. My whole solution involved using my Google mini to turn my virtual machine on or off.

To do that, I created a Google Action on the Google Actions console. I had played around with Actions before, but this would be different. I have been making most of my conversational agents using Microsoft’s Bot FrameworkBot Framework, so a lot of the concepts were familiar to me, from things like Intents, to Utterances and even the use of webhooks. For this action, I largely had to focus on just one Intent – the one that would hear a command for a VM state change and execute. Overall, the system would look like this:

Creating the action

So, I created this custom Intent that took me to Dialogflow, Google’s interactive tool for building conversational interfaces. There, I created a custom intent, ChangeVMState.

ChangeVMState would receive messages and figure out if to turn a VM on or off. The messages could be in a range of formats like:

turn on/off

power on/off

shutdown/start up the vm

They would resolve to the ChangeVMState intent. All messages sent to ChangeVMState was then forwarded to my webhook. I deployed the webhook as a function in Azure.

The code to execute the functions is pretty straightforward. One function receives the request and queues it on an Azure Storage Queue. Azure functions provides a really simple infrastructure for doing just that.

I mean, this is the whole method:

The item being put on the queue – the desired VM state – is just a variable being set.

Another function in Azure will then take up the values in the queue and will start or stop the VM based on state. Again, a pretty simple bit of code.

I’m using the Azure Fluent Management SDK to start/stop a VM

So, finally, after the VM is put into the desired state, an email is sent either saying the VM is off or that it’s on and an RDP file is included. Ideally, I wanted to have the Google Assistant I was using notify me when the VM got up and running, but I just couldn’t get push notifications working – which is why I ended up with email.

Thus, I ended up with a Google Action, that I eventually called VILMA Agent (at first, I was calling it Shelly-Ann). I could say to my Google Mini, “OK, Google, tell VILMA Agent, turn on” and I’d get an email with an RDP file.